Shouldn't
by vargrimar
Summary: In a foreign body, Wheatley does not belong. Human!Wheatley/Chell.


He shouldn't even be here.

Wheatley is a lanky mass of pale limbs and protruding ribs on the linoleum of the bathroom floor. The harshness of the lights bleeds into his vision and soaks in bleary blinking shapes when he buries his face into his arms. His fingers press crescent moons into his lifelines and foreign wetness drips down his face; he's shivering, heaving, his chest an anxious coil of snakes, and no matter how much he tries to breathe and compose himself, nothing works.

She's somewhere in the next room, but she doesn't want anything to do with him. And he doesn't blame her. There's nothing he could say to make her believe him. The way she glares at his body when he's anywhere within her presence peels him apart and shoves him into darker places. He's tiny all over again; a hopeless little thing, stupid, a discarded construct nobody cared to incinerate.

"I'm not a moron," he exhales into his unwanted skin. His spine crawls with the cold of the floor and he struggles in staccato breaths. He's too lost, too overwhelmed, too _small_ for this. "I'm not," he chants, heartbeat drumming, "I'm not, I'm not, I'm _not_ ," but She made sure he felt like one. Stuffing him into this man's body was the cruelest thing She could have ever done.

He shouldn't even _be_ here.

Curling in on himself, he shudders as the world seems to flood in and pour down his throat. His lungs are too full, brimming with guilt, regret, oceans, deep enough to have anemones flowing by his windpipe and starfish sticking to his insides. Nothing will come out; it bonds to cells and membranes and clings like tar.

Beyond the door, he can hear footsteps. They're punctuated, purposeful; hers.

She took him in because she's not the monster he said she was. She doesn't want him here, he knows, but she's given him shelter, sustenance, and shoved him under torrents of water to purge the remnants of the outside world from his body. Even though the steel of her eyes is scathing and her silence screams paragraphs on the wrongs he's done, she would never maltreat him. She's not the monster he said she was.

He wishes he hadn't said those awful things.

Chell stares at him from the doorway, puncturing something through his ribcage. Her arms are crossed, her hair let down, and it frames her face in such a way that she seems troubled, older, worn. Her brown skin is warm in the glow of the overhead light, and his blurry vision halos her and the gentle shape of her body. In an attempt to hide himself from her, he brings his legs up to his belly and hunches in, curving his spine in a trembling arc. The world is shut out; he wants to shrink, to become nothing; he wants his old body back; he wants to be gone.

She lowers herself next to him on the floor, her legs tucked at an angle. The warmth of her hands threads through his disheveled hair and kneads his scalp, massaging in a gentle rhythm that prickles down his backbone. Anxiety pulls out of him in thin strands, spooling out one at a time as her nails graze past his ears and down the cords of muscle that lead into the column of his neck. His hollow of his chest is still bursting with knotted unease—why is she here, what is she doing, why is she touching him, what is she going to do, what's happening, _why_ —but all he can do is make garbled noises in his throat and try not to let himself panic.

She shouldn't even _be_ here.

Her fingers continue to work small circles, spreading through the plane of his scalp and tugging tenderly through his thick hair. He twists upward and tries to squint at her through the harsh overlight, but all that's there is a mass of color and shadow. He wants to say something, but his throat is so tight; there's something cinching itself too close, pinching and constricting upward by his adam's apple, folding inward to where he can't swallow.

The soft pads of her fingers brush over his eyelids. At her command, he closes them and lets her cradle his head by her lap. His breathing starts to slow, drawing out into smoother, calmer exhales, and as she starts to scratch at his scalp again, he feels the tension in his body start to unwind. It starts in his shoulder blades, fraying down his spinal column in a gradual pull; it works through his hips, his legs, his arms, the muscles loosening as she rubs down his neck.

"I'm sorry," he murmurs. He paws at her knee with a willowy hand. "I'm… I'm sorry."

Chell says nothing. The only response she gives is the tender movements of her fingers.

She shouldn't even be here—and yet she is.


End file.
